I'm reading a gripping mystery. I read it through lunch alone at my favorite cafe of the great turkey sandwich, and upstairs throughout my husband's and daughter's work on her taxes, and it awaits me as soon as I do my exercise video, find the perfect present for my granddaughter's second birthday, pick up a gift for a friend's 80th birthday, vacuum the dog hair, and get inspired about what to cook for dinner. It's my desert island. Why mysteries? Well, if they are sophisticated enough, because you're mulling a bunch of questions and some of them never get answered, and the characters are forced to grapple with uncertainty. Uncertainty is the stuff of life. We spend a lot of time and energy denying our lack of control over our lives, but in a mystery I can let the protagonist take over the struggle, and play out that risk, adventure, and sudden twisting and turning that any life contains.
"Don't know" is the proper frame of mind for a detective, and her curiosity allows her to see what is obscured to others. It is safer to practice this openness in a book, obviously, and practice makes perfect. Does the doctor KNOW what will happen to you? He makes his best guess. Does what is happening today predict tomorrow? We get a lot of free fall vicariously: 9/11, earthquakes in China, the pedestrian hit in the crosswalk. Then we get the sudden heart attack of our mother, the stroke of a good friend, our child's illness that could turn out either way, the bad mammogram. We can never be fully prepared, especially for exactly what will befall us, unless it is death. And we don't know how we will manage our own death or anyone elses until we're there.
But we can understand we are not in control of anything but our attitude towards sharp shifts in our world. We can remember that it's the basic condition of our existence. And appreciate life this moment. Whatever comes, we are blessed to be in and of this world, however long it turns out to be.
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